growfs, bsdlabel or fdisk issue

Svein Halvor Halvorsen svein-freebsd-questions at theloosingend.net
Thu Mar 4 05:24:45 PST 2004


On my laptop I have dual-boot with Windows XP, but as I allmost never boot
it in Windows, and since my /usr-partition is running out of space, I
decided to shrink the FAT-partition that I've been sharing between to two
oses.

So I used FreeBSD's fdisk to remove the existing FAT-partition, and to
extend the FreeBSD-slice. I then used bsdlabel to change the disk's label
to reflect the new size of the slice. I changed the c-partition to include
the entire slice, and the f-partition (which was the last partition of the
slice, directly followed by the former FAT-partition) was extended to the
end of the slice.

So far all seems ok. So I boot in single user and tries to run growfs. But
all growfs gives me is:

	growfs: rdfs: read error -1940904252 Input/output error


After lots of trying, I decided to instead of resizing /usr, to just add a
new g-partition, and split /usr in /usr and /home, where the latter could
live on the new partition. But bsdlabel won't let me reduce the size of
the f-partition to add a new g-partition. According to the manual page og
bsdlabel:

	The kernel device drivers will not allow the size of a disk
	partition to be decreased or the offset of a partition to be
	changed while it is open.


But even if I'm in single user mode, with /usr not mounted, I still can't
get this to work. And bsdlabel keeps giving me the following error (which
by the way has a misspelled 'suppressed'):

	bsdlabel: write to disk label supressed - label was as follows:



Any help would be appreciated. I'd like to keep my data intact while still
getting more diskspace for my FreeBSD installation.



Svein Halvor



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